He stood barefoot and defiant on the low-tide flats, initially believing we were part of the recent assault on his home. He was short and wiry, his right ankle bent and marked with an old injury that caught my eye as we listened to him. He would put no weight on it, though it looked to have been there for years. The scar was the exact outline of a musket ball, and it must have passed clean into the bone. Both sides of his forehead were marked with deep scars, as though somebody had taken the time to disfigure him in deliberate symmetry.

‘And how does a prospector wind up in these islands?’ asked the master, drily. The man looked up and down the length of Argyle’s muslin dress and did not answer.

His wife, a native woman, and small daughter, were sheltering in the hut and would not come out. He said his home was over east beyond the hills, and waved vaguely towards the pale mountain that spiked the horizon in that direction. ‘Crystals,’ he said. ‘Nuff to fill a boat if I please ter.’ He volunteered this in some mercantile way, I thought. Such a man might hint at riches in hopes of saving his skin.

He had a plan that involved sending quantities of gems to the governor: I did not follow why. As his fear wore off, he became boastful: he was, he claimed, the first and only miner in the islands. He asked us for passage to Preservation, where he had business to attend to. The doctor asked him if he needed to go back and tell his wife of his departure, but he demurred. ‘Be back soon enough. Prefer to keep em out of bother in the meantime.’

As we took him on board he cursed all the while, and in my hearing, about the fuckin gummint and their fuckin eightpounders. He swore the fusillade was nothing more than drunken troops entertaining themselves at his expense. I’d seen nothing to contradict that account, but of course I had no understanding of what went on in such a place. Then he moved on to the topic of his wife and his expression softened. ‘Good woman, heathen or no. Saved me from my sinful ways.’

Argyle watched him struggling up the rope ladder onto the Moonbird as we waited in the jolly-boat, and delivered one of those inscrutable assessments he made above the pretty lace collar. ‘Absconder. Wants a pardon from the gov’nor. No danger to us.’

Onward, to the south, the sky building.